1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed generally to computer security. More specifically, the present invention is directed to a system, computer program product and method of preventing recordation of true keyboard acoustic emanations.
2. Description of Related Art
There is a plurality of methods for extracting information from supposedly secure computing systems. These methods involve side-channel attacks. Side-channel attacks use crypto-analytic techniques that rely on information unintentionally leaked by computing devices. For example, electromagnetic emanations, power consumption, diffuse visible light from CRT displays and acoustic emanations of CPU activity have all been used with crypto-analytic techniques to glean information from computer systems.
Another source that may be used to extract information from computing systems is acoustic emanations from keyboards. It has been shown recently that if one has a long enough audio recording (e.g., 10 minutes of recording) of some one typing on an ordinary computer keyboard, the text typed can be recovered. The premise is that different keys tend to make slightly different sounds. Although one may not know in advance which keys make which sounds, using machine learning and a long enough sample of someone typing on a keyboard, one can figure out which keys make which sounds. Once done the typed text may be recovered. This side-channel attack is discussed in KEYBOARD ACOUSTIC EMANATIONS, by Asonov and Agrawal, IBM Almaden Research Center and in KEYBOARD ACOUSTIC EMANATIONS REVISITED, by Zhuang, Zhou and Tygar, University of California at Berkeley. See also an ABC news article at http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200509/s1460695.htm. Both references as well as a copy of the news article are disclosed in an Information Disclosure Statement filed concurrently with the present application.
Thus, what is needed is a system, computer program product and method of preventing recordation of true keyboard acoustic emanations.